Dear visitor, welcome to SPRINKLER TALK FORUM - You Got Questions, We've Got Answers. If this is your first visit here, please read the Help. It explains how this page works. You must be registered before you can use all the page's features. Please use the registration form, to register here or read more information about the registration process. If you are already registered, please login here.

Rotor placement around trees

Hey everyone,

I'm beginning to design a sprinkler to put in by next summer, and I'm running into some design problems. I'm on a corner lot with 7 HUGE pecan trees in the front yard, a few of which have split trunks that are easily 3-4 ft wide. I originally wanted to just place rotors around the perimeter of the yard since its only around 25' wide and that would have given good head to head coverage across the yard, but I'm afraid that the tree trunks will cause uneven coverage and dry spots when they block the stream. There's one spot in particular where two trees are close to the two corners where rotors should be, and they'd block more than 50% of the area.

How do you design around this? Would it be better to just plan for 3 rows of sprays instead of rotors? I hope to have some down time this weekend and get dirty in visio or sketchup to see exactly how the coverage would be affected. I'll put what I design so you all can see what I mean.

Thanks!

EDIT: I started to draw my lawn in Sketchup using a rough survey from when we bought the house, and kept thinking that something wasn't right with the dimensions... Sure enough, the house was the right size, and the yard size was WAY off. The grass is more like 35-45 feet wide at parts, which is going to make this even more difficult. I didn't really want to put any sprinklers under the canopy of the trees as I don't want to disturb their roots, but it seems as though that's going to be unavoidable, as I only have 55PSI static pressure from the city.

This post has been edited 3 times, last edit by "joraff" (Jul 3rd 2009, 3:56pm)

The best way to deal with the tree canopies is to avoid digging any trenches under the tree canopy (as you can expect the root system to spread as much as the tree canopy), but to then locate a sprinkler under the tree canopy, dig a trench radialy from the point of the sprinkler to the nearest trench out from under the canopy. That way you won't be cutting across feeder roots.